Turns out I wasn't done with the album, though, because my friend Martin in Montreal insisted I make physical copies rather than "Beyoncé-ing" another record. And even Beyoncé has copies of her self titled album for sale now, so I had no convincing reply. He'd gotten an EP and a full length album recorded by his band Alexeimartov pressed onto vinyl, and was looking to put other artists out on his fledgling label. So MB-LP became a real LP, Queen Mary Records #003. An ambitious amount of zeros.
My new idea for album art wasn't exactly simple. The front and back were each divided into 16 coloured squares and lines, respectively, one for each personality type. The titles, track listing, and acknowledgements were printed on that background. So I bought the right number of spray paints and painstakingly cut paper stencils for all the shapes and text involved. With a dry time of around 10 minutes, and all of the text being double printed black on white, it was a 13-step process. I made a prototype but found that the edges of the text were fuzzy and hard to read.
I had to keep most of my paint in the house, since the garage was freezing. But I worked my way through a hundred and nine jackets, only accidentally flipping the colours on five of them. Next I needed to print the text on them, so I built myself silkscreens out of sheer curtain fabric and bits of wood, then figured out how to expose the screens using the photo emulsion method. You spread washable blocking paste onto the whole screen, prepare transparencies of your art and place those on top, and then burn the screen in with a high wattage bulb. I got a couple neat 250W bulbs for this, but they both burnt out within a couple minutes of use so I wound up using a normal 60W bulb.
The light hardens the emulsion except where your art has protected the screen, so you can wash just those parts out and you have a fabric stencil of your art. I built a hinged press to hold the screens in place and started doing test prints. My results were miserable at first; even with professional tools I bet that technique is pretty important in silk-screening, but with my jury-rigged contraption good pressure and delicate shimming was the only difference between perfection and puddles of illegible ink.
A five step process turned into nine steps as I found that I had to break the screens into sections to get them to print reliably. I was able to touch up most mistakes with a tiny paintbrush, but 8 of the jackets were irretrievably ruined. That still left me a hundred good ones, though, and that's all I needed.
They really are all unique, since my style changed over the course of each step in the process. I went from thick application of colour and rigid adherence to the lines to a lighter, airier approach. None of them are perfect, but I remember them all. Perfection is boring anyway.
Martin bankrolled the whole operation, and had the smallest possible order of records (100) pressed at Trutone Mastering in New York. Luckily my 16 tracks were short enough to fit on an LP, and I sent him unmastered versions of the tracks so they could master them specifically for vinyl. I know there's some curve they use to attenuate the bass when they cut the record that gets reversed at playback, but having never done it before I figured it'd be better to let them do it.
I'd never decorated a record jacket before either though, but for some reason I decided I didn't mind trying that. I'd already made the labels for the records out of some doctored graphs from a psychology textbook, and I made album art to be printed onto jackets: an old photo for the front and a picture of my notes on the back. I could have easily paid a print shop or duplication service to make them for me, but I decided to go with a different design that I could manufacture myself.
I'm not totally sure why. Partly it's because I still have a whole pile of CDs left over from the first time I had jackets made, and thinking about them sitting, cold and identical, in a box in the crawlspace makes me feel hopeless. Another part is that the music is homemade, with no one who knows what they're doing involved from conception to sending the audio in, so I felt like the package should be too. I feel better selling them if they're also one-of-a-kind works of physical art. The third reason is because I'm an idiot.
I'm not totally sure why. Partly it's because I still have a whole pile of CDs left over from the first time I had jackets made, and thinking about them sitting, cold and identical, in a box in the crawlspace makes me feel hopeless. Another part is that the music is homemade, with no one who knows what they're doing involved from conception to sending the audio in, so I felt like the package should be too. I feel better selling them if they're also one-of-a-kind works of physical art. The third reason is because I'm an idiot.
My new idea for album art wasn't exactly simple. The front and back were each divided into 16 coloured squares and lines, respectively, one for each personality type. The titles, track listing, and acknowledgements were printed on that background. So I bought the right number of spray paints and painstakingly cut paper stencils for all the shapes and text involved. With a dry time of around 10 minutes, and all of the text being double printed black on white, it was a 13-step process. I made a prototype but found that the edges of the text were fuzzy and hard to read.
There was no way to weight down my stencils enough to make even contact with the jacket, especially with the tiny cutouts and compressed paint shooting at it. I decided to make rigid wooden frames for the background painting, and silkscreen the text instead. The wooden frames worked well, as long as I scraped off the built-up layers of paint periodically. One thing I noticed when I started doing batches of jackets was that, even in a garage with the doors open to the winter weather and fans going, the fumes were fierce. I got a respirator the second day and my blinding headaches and dizziness disappeared.
The light hardens the emulsion except where your art has protected the screen, so you can wash just those parts out and you have a fabric stencil of your art. I built a hinged press to hold the screens in place and started doing test prints. My results were miserable at first; even with professional tools I bet that technique is pretty important in silk-screening, but with my jury-rigged contraption good pressure and delicate shimming was the only difference between perfection and puddles of illegible ink.
A five step process turned into nine steps as I found that I had to break the screens into sections to get them to print reliably. I was able to touch up most mistakes with a tiny paintbrush, but 8 of the jackets were irretrievably ruined. That still left me a hundred good ones, though, and that's all I needed.
They really are all unique, since my style changed over the course of each step in the process. I went from thick application of colour and rigid adherence to the lines to a lighter, airier approach. None of them are perfect, but I remember them all. Perfection is boring anyway.